Review: 'the amateurs' takes on God, Noah's ark and the plague. For laughs.

In “The Amateurs,” a hilarious, slightly eggheaded and strangely moving medieval backstager that opened on Tuesday at the Vineyard Theater, he locates the dawning of individual character — onstage and off — in the moment people began to doubt God.

And Hollis’ troupe, in which God is played by a mellifluous blowhard named Larking, has good reason to doubt him. Their tour of Italy — performing not just “Noah’s Ark” but also those crowd pleasers “Cain and Abel” and “The Fall of Man” — is really a desperate attempt to keep a step ahead of the plague. They do not always succeed. “Half of everyone we’ve ever known,” says Rona, a disgruntled ingénue, “is in the ground now.”

This makes casting difficult. In “Noah’s Ark,” which features a “Seven Deadly Sins” prologue, Rona plays both Gluttony and Mrs. Shem, until a death in the troupe requires her to play Mr. Shem as well. In general, the actors are what might now be called versatile, and also what might now be called bad. Larking (Thomas Jay Ryan) doesn’t make much of a distinction between God and Lechery; when Gregory, the dim set designer, is dragooned to play Sloth, you can hardly hear him behind his mask. As Noah and Pride, Brom (Kyle Beltran) is as stiff as a corpse, and Rona (Jennifer Kim) just doesn’t care.

Their flatness matches that of their biblical repertoire, which is formal, presentational and strictly without subtext: “like a school play where the kids play vegetables.” To alter the rhyming couplets with extraneous emotion or a hint of free will would be a form of blasphemy. But after suffering an even more grievous loss than usual, Hollis (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) begins to question God — and also his dialogue. In a moment of stubborn curiosity that alters the aesthetic history of mankind, she asks what would happen if Mrs. Noah just didn’t feel like getting on that ark one day.

What would happen, Harrison suggests, is the Renaissance, or very nearly. The beginning of self-consciousness, he argues, is the beginning of enlightenment. If this sounds a bit heady for a rollicking tragicomedy in which pratfalls and death throes are tumbled together, that is part of the play’s unusual scheme. Halfway through the troupe’s journey toward salvation — which for them means a command performance with an important duke who may take them under his wing — “The Amateurs” jumps ahead seven centuries.

This is only in part so that Harrison, who now appears as a character onstage, can connect the dots between the Black Death and AIDS. The detour also allows him to delay the return trip down the mountain of plot he has spent the first half of the play climbing. What Harrison, the character, says he is avoiding is the very object of that trek: the play’s catharsis, which he doubts he can earn. In a world of endless suffering, a catharsis is “innately complacent,” he concludes.

Like the rest of “The Amateurs,” this despairing contemporary interlude is frantically funny, even when it veers into an art history lecture. Playing Harrison, Michael Cyril Creighton, who in the medieval scenes is handy Gregory, paints a witty, affectionate portrait of a neurotic playwright afraid of his own tools. It can’t be a realistic portrait; Harrison could hardly wield those tools so expertly if his hands were shaking. As in his 2015 play “Marjorie Prime” — a superbly controlled exercise in speculative fiction that elicits profound feeling without appearing to solicit it — “The Amateurs” works by a kind of indirection. The magic happens, by design, wherever the playwright isn’t pointing.

So the postmodern gewgaws are a bit of a decoy. They might work even better if there were fewer of them, as Harrison seems to know. (“Hopefully you aren’t allergic to these sorts of shenanigans,” his stand-in says.) When Bernstine interrupts his interruption with her own take on Hollis’ story, you begin to wonder whether the material has gone a bit too deep into the theatrical weeds, too far for civilians to follow. But just as she did in Anne Washburn’s heady backstager “10 out of 12,” Bernstine, so legible and relatable and seemingly guileless, grounds even the most meta material with quiet feeling.

Still, I kept thinking that a fully cooked play shouldn’t need so much exegesis and counterpoint. It didn’t seem likely that Harrison’s self-parodying seminar, however amusing, could deepen the play’s action when it returned to medieval Italy. Eventually, though, I understood that deepening wasn’t the point; distancing was. “The Amateurs” wants to be seen with a form of double vision in which the past and the present are both present. We are meant to be vigilant about the “luxury of fiction,” with its false sense of endings.

Which is why these medieval actors all have names you might expect to find on a teen soap opera. At every turn, Oliver Butler’s gutsy production supports rather than tries to disguise such anachronisms. The singsong verse of the morality plays is countered by ribald cross talk delivered with naturalistic verve. And whenever the troupe’s pageant wagon — a cabinet of curiosities filled with handmade surprises — sits in the middle of the Vineyard’s modern stage (both designed by David Zinn) you see in one image the continuity of human creativity in the face of disaster.

The cast, which also includes Greg Keller as a newcomer to the troupe, is a cabinet of curiosities in itself, a collection of off-Broadway treasures. Of course, all actors love to re-enact theatrical disaster stories, and Harrison loads “The Amateurs” with plenty of gags. But Bernstine and the others are seriously funny, by which I mean funny in a serious way: a good thing in a play that has so much on its mind. Among the themes that light up like fireflies here and there are the nature of sin, the purpose of art, the low status of actors and the low status of humans in general. If history has been a drama, it has consigned almost everyone throughout time to the chorus.

And so it really is a thrilling, expansive, world-changing moment in a very sneaky play when Hollis, contemplating Mrs. Noah, first asks, What’s my motivation? Which is a question you can only begin to contemplate after asking, What is God’s?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.